"You're absolutely positive that's what she said?" Felix was floored.
"Think my ears are the only thing left that work." Cosima confirmed. A whole other freakin' project. Just what they needed on top of the mountain of information they'd swallowed over the last two days.
"Next thing you know they'll be releasing a bloody unicorn into the wild." Felix started to take over Alison's pacing duties, while she leaned over the kitchen sink. They were lab rats in an experiment, and they were not alone.
"Okay, Scott still has the encrypted sequence. If he can make sense of some of this stuff in the book, we'll be in a much better place than we were yesterday." The coughs were coming harder now, and even more frequent. Every minute she spent sitting upright started to feel like an uphill battle.
"We should get you back to bed, Cosima." Alison gently suggested. Bearing witness to her battle was getting too heart wrenching to stomach. The coughs shook her body so violently, she worried each would be her last. Cosima soldiered on, wheezing and gasping, then typing away at her keyboard with trembling hands, trying to pretend it didn't happen.
"Sarah'll be back soon, we have to tell her about Delphine and the cipher." Even with so much to do, she couldn't ignore the fatigue overpowering her body. Dr. Moreau. Male clones. Castor. It was overwhelming.
"She's in McMansionland, it'll take her a bit. Grab yourself some shut-eye, and we'll wake you when she gets in." Felix crossed his arms. "Don't make me treat you like a client." He hid his fear with his signature sass.
"Bet Alison would love to watch." She sank back into the couch cushions, letting the painful spasms run their course. Her body seemed to side with Felix and Alison. Maybe just a few minutes wouldn't hurt.
"Right, down you go." Felix unfurled a blanket, draping it over her while Alison tucked in the corners, hovering around like a bee to pollen.
"That's what she said." Cosima mumbled, finally letting the drowsiness take over.
"Cheeky." Felix retreated to his barstool, as Alison stood watch, restlessly tapping her fingers against the coffee mug cradled in her hands.
"Is it me, or is this whole thing happening really, really fast?" She whispered, observing the slumbering Cosima from afar. Before the Leekie incident, everything seemed quasi-controlled. Now, her sister was on the ropes with a disease that could very well be lurking in her own DNA.
"Like a bloody freight train." The stained tissues littering his apartment grew more numerous each day.
"All this time she was working for them, and they just-just let her get sicker and sicker, dangling treatments over her like a carrot." As she always said, lab rats in an illegal experiment. She took her gun out of her waistband, setting it on the soiled countertop, poised for action, should someone come and threaten her family.
"Think they would've come for us by now." He nodded to the gleaming weapon pointed towards the door. They were a soccer mom, a rent boy, and a dying scientist, in a loft without a proper lock, they were hardly tough targets.
"They wouldn't have to." The thought hadn't escaped her. They were up to something over there, something that kept them too busy to care about two of their lab rats leaving. Alison's eyes darted between Cosima and the clock on the wall. Sarah needed to return with answers soon. Her fingers calmly circled the rim of her mug. "Felix, they still have my contract." She'd already signed her life away, there was nothing to stop them from barging in and carting her away.
"I thought the whole point of the contract was they promised to bugger off." Felix's head tilted slightly, a quizzical look taking over. It was supposed to be the only upside to getting in bed with them.
"Well, they promised they'd keep us safe, too." Fat load of good they were doing for Cosima. "Aren't exactly people of their word." She folded her arms, keeping one hand held aloft.
The paranoia storm was brewing, and Felix knew how quickly she could jump to conclusions. "It's a different game now, we've got a mysterious lady on the inside, and they still got Donnie as your monitor, right?"
"Right." She stewed
"So just….lay low." Felix shrugged, trying to pull another vaguely encouraging thought from the deep reaches of his mind.. "You're the suburban housewife, what sort of trouble do they think you're getting into?" His attention snapped to the door, hearing a knock.
"It's just me, Fe." Sarah tapped knocked again, shifting her weight from side to side as she waited impatiently for the door to slide open. She had too much information, and very little time to act on it. "A whole other batch, I can't—"
"Oi, quiet, Cosima's resting." Felix gently guided the door back in place
"She alright?" Of course she wasn't, but after their talk that morning, her concerns were perfectly valid.
Felix didn't have to say anything, the coughs punctuating Cosima's steady wheeze were answers enough.
"Marion said she'd send someone with supplies, hopin' they'd be here by now." Cosima had stayed quiet about how she was feeling, but try as she might, she couldn't hide the little grimaces that came with each coughing fit. She had to be in pain.
Sarah shrugged off her coat, dangling it from the top hook. She noticed one was missing. "Helena take off?" Her eyes caught the silver canister waiting beneath.
"We think she went to see that Jesse fellow she was talking about." Alison poured her a hot mug of tea. She wouldn't have pegged Helena as a romantic, but whoever this guy was, she was fond of him. Even the Hunter had a giddy schoolgirl inside.
"Think she earned a little time to herself.". Sarah squatted closer to the ground to get a closer look. 'Biological Materials' couldn't be less specific. She wracked her brain, trying to remember if Helena had said anything about the contents. "Get any more news from the gawky bloke at DYAD?"
"No, but we got a call from Delphine." Felix offered up a nugget of good news they'd gotten. "In Frankfurt, for real."
"Finally." She plopped on a stool beside the pair. "Don't 'spose she's any closer to a cure than we are." She'd take any drop of information the scientist had to offer.
"I don't think so, we got the cipher." Cosima dropped the book on the counter, sneaking up on the group. She'd have plenty of time to rest on the couch once they cracked the secrets within.
"He wrote it down." She'd lied to Rachel after all. She picked up the tattered tome. It seemed so ordinary. Brilliant for hiding a secret in plain sight. She looked back to Cosima, turning down Felix's seat, standing tall defiantly.
"Yeah, Scott's trying to see if there's a pattern with the sequence we already know." Cosima squeezed her laptop in on the crowded countertop.
Meanwhile, Scott stood outside the door slab, rapping on the surface with one hand, while holding the bag of supplies Marion had entrusted to him. IV tubing, medications, she swore it would help.
Alison silently excused herself to tend to the noise, gun in hand, waiting to fend off an unanticipated visitor. She opened the door a sliver to get a good look at him. Tall and dorky, she liked her odds. "Who are you?" She poked the gun barrel in the space.
"Whoa." He was caught off guard by the appearance of a new identical. "Um Scott, Cosima's lab tech, I have some stuff to help her." He spouted the information as fast as his mouth would allow as he held up the bag. Alison narrowed her eyes, and he tried to think of something that would win her over. "I helped put the pencil in Rachel's eye." He whispered. Alison opened the door wider, letting him slip inside.
"Rachel smashed your bone marrow vials to bits over this information, are you sure we should be sharing it with people at DYAD?" Sarah furrowed her brow. True, she fought for Delphine's return to the states, but she witnessed also witnessed Rachel's tantrum firsthand. Even with Marion on their side, she had a hard time putting her trust in anyone under DYAD's roof.
"I don't have a choice, Sarah." Cosima leaned on the oxygen tank a little harder, starting to get worked up. "Scott and Delphine risked everything to get the two of us out of there." Her voice shook as her body started to tremble, her weak frame unable to contain the erupting rage. Neither of them had noticed Scott had even entered the room.
"Cos, if it gets in the wrong hands, DYAD could use it against us, against you." Sarah tried appealing to Cosima's logical side. She was as good as dead if they managed to maim this information in the same way as the marrow. She was caught off guard, she had never seen her get this angry before. "This is our last chance at a cure."
"And you need to trust me when I say I they can find it." Scott was her right-hand man from the start, and Delphine…well, it was high time she stood up for the woman she loved. "I'm the freakin' science. It's my biology, it's my decision!" She roared with a guttural energy she hadn't shown in weeks. Her heart was pounding in her ears.
"I'm not letting you kill yourself to prove a bloody point!" Sarah rose, her own anger finally spewing loose. In her mind, they needed Delphine back on North American soil, and Scott out of the belly of the beast before they could share such sensitive information.
"Without them, I'm already dead!—" Her body lurched forward, propelled by a coughing ambush, splattering blood on Sarah as she struggled to keep her upright.
"Cosima….Cosima!" Sarah's eyes widened in horror as they both crumpled to the floor. God, why wouldn't she stop shaking? Felix held Alison back, her hands covering her mouth. Scott swooped in, opening the bag of goodies in his care. It was the same scene he saw unfold in the lab with Ethan. Now was definitely a good time to finally make his presence known to the rest of the room.
Sarah went on the defense, seeing the strange hands. "Oi, don't you bloody touch-" Sarah cut herself off when she recognized the man who helped her escape.
"Just help me keep her arm still." He calmly drew up the sedative, just as the doctor had showed him. Sarah averted her eyes while he slid the needle into Cosima's vein. She wanted to take everything she said back. She wouldn't be able to forgive herself if her last conversation with Cosima was a shouting match.
"It's working." Scott let out a relieved sigh as the seizing subsided. "Um, help me get her to the couch?"
Felix bolted in to assist, and the trio gently laid her down. "What the hell was that?" Felix asked.
"Seizure, I think. It can happen with kidney failure." Scott went back into the bag of tricks while Sarah stayed plastered to Cosima's side, barely acknowledging the still-warm blood angrily streaked on her. "When's she wakin' up?" She finally found her words.
"A little while." He wasn't the doctor, he couldn't give her a concrete answer. "Her system needs a bit to reset after all that."
All that. Sarah was already crushed by the guilt. She laced her fingers in Cosima's limp hand, wishing she hadn't been blinded by fear. She let her anger get the best of her, and it pushed her sister away.
"We should get you cleaned up." Alison offered softly, gently pulling Cosima's glasses off for safekeeping.
"I'm fine." Sarah was staying put. She needed to be there when Cosima woke up. She needed to apologize. To tell her she was right, and she trusted Scott and Delphine with all her heart if Cosima did too.
Scott silently worked around her, sliding in the IV line, and squeezing a bag of saline in place. He stole a glance at the silver container left against the wall. "Can I ask what's with the liquid nitrogen tank?"
"Hopin' you might have an answer to that." Sarah snapped from her daze.
"Couldn't hurt to try." He snapped off his latex gloves, and studied the canister intently. "Let's see…" He muttered, popping the lid open. "Wow, um, where did you get these?" He held the vials up to the light to see the labels better, and his eyes lit up. Real, live, egg cells. If these matched Cosima, it'd be a groundbreaking find for her treatment.
"Helena brought them, why, what is it?" Felix straightened up, intrigued by the scientist's sudden excitement.
"This is way better than bone marrow."